September 15, 1974

A Martyr to Sin

By WALTER CLEMONS

LORD ROCHESTER'S MONKEY
By Graham Greene.

n the best known portrait of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, a pet monkey proffers a tattered page ripped from one of his master's books. The Earl, resplendent in silks, coolly awards the beast a laurel crown. "Were I...," Rochester wrote, "a spirit free, to choose for my own share/ what sort of flesh and blood I pleas'd to wear,/ I'd be a dog, a monkey or a bear,/ Or any thing but that vain animal/ Who is so proud of being rational."

For more than two centuries Rochester's notoriety as the wildest of "the merry gang" of wits who converged at Charles II's court during the 1660's overshadowed his reputation as a poet. The poetry- skeptical, parodistic, obscene and scathing- was a rediscovery of the 1920's, though John Hayward's 1926 Nonesuch edition escaped prosecution only by being limited to 1,050 copies. A scholarly biography by Vivian de Sola Pinto (1935; revised as "Enthusiast in Wit," 1962) usefully related Rochester's libertinism to Hobbesian materialism- specifically to Hobbes's doctrine that sensory experience was the only philosophical reality. Pinto pitched his claims high: "If Milton is the great poet of belief in the 17th century, Rochester is the great poet of unbelief."

Professor Pinto's book hadn't yet appeared when Graham Greene, an unsuccessful novelist in his twenties, wrote a biography of Rochester 40 years ago. It was turned down "without hesitation" by his publisher, Greene told us in his 1971 autobiography, "and I was too uncertain of myself to send it elsewhere." The typescript has now been retrieved from the University of Texas library, minimally revised and elaborately packaged by George Rainbird Ltd. of London in the format of Nancy Mitford's "The Sun King" and Angus Wilson's "The World of Charles Dickens."

"Lord Rochester's Monkey," it turns out, is Greene's best early work- a writer's book about a writer, with the vibrations of affinity we feel in Henry James's "Hawthorne" or John Berryman's "Stephen Crane." Greene, who had drawn the title of his first novel from Sir Thomas Browne- "There's another man within me that's angry with me"- responded to the discord between Cavalier and Puritan in Rochester's character, the extremities of debauchery and disgust, his personal elegance and appetite for squalor, the acrid blend of bawdry and moral fervor in his verses.

Rochester lived with extraordinary velocity. Son of a Cavalier general who had followed Charles II into exile, and of a strong willed Puritan mother, he presented himself at court at 17- "graceful, tho' tall and slender," according to an early account, "his mien and shape having something extremely engaging; and for his mind, it discovered charms not to be withstood." The next year he was in the Tower for having tried to abduct the heiress Elizabeth Mallet, whose guardians aimed to auction her in marriage to a higher bidder. Freed, he redeemed himself by bravery with the fleet against the Dutch, returned to be sworn a Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber and to elope with Elizabeth Mallet, this time successfully, when he was 19.

Of the tradition that he "was very barbarous to his own lady, tho' so very fine a woman," Greene observes that "infidelity was the full extent of his barbarity. A love story... may have lain hidden between these two young, witty and unhappy people." As he veered between country and court, Rochester's inconstancy seems to have tormented him. More than one letter to his wife is filled with tender regret: "I myself have a sense of what the methods of my life seem so utterly to contradict..."

Rochester told the historian Gibert Burnet that "for five years together he was continually drunk; not all the while under the visible effect of it." He was repeatedly banished- and as often recalled- by the King he scurrilously lampooned. Drink made him "extravagantly pleasant"; it also led to disgraces like the smashing of the royal sundial and the brawl at Epsom in which his friend Mr. Downes was killed. Greene plausibly links the most famous of Rochester's masquerades to the aftermath of the Epsom affray: he vanished from London and a mysterious Dr. Alexander Bendo- astrologer, diviner of dreams, dispenser of beauty aids and cures for women's diseases- set up shop on Tower Hill. "Dr. Bendo's" advertisement is one of the most dazzling virtuoso pieces of 17th-century prose. In its impromptu rush of quackery and Biblical cadences, its promises of marvels and its teasing challenge to distinguish the counterfeit from the real. Greene astutely notes "the cracks in the universe of Hobbes, the disturbing doubts in his disbelief, which may have been in Rochester's mind even in the midst of his masquerade, so riddled is the broadsheet with half truths."

Dating his poems is a snare, but Rochester's Songs and his best satires- "A Ramble in St. James's Park," the "Satyr Against Reason and Mankind," "A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country," "The Maim'd Debauchee"- all seem to have been written before he turned 29. Thereafter "an embittered and thoughtful man who would die in 1680 of old age at 33," he seldom appeared at court. In his last year he debated theology with the Anglican Gilbert Burnet and underwent a religious conversion, the authenticity of which was impugned when Burnet published his account of it but which Greene, like Vivian de Sola Pinto, believes to have been genuine. "The hand of God touched him," Burnet wrote- "but," Greene characteristically adds, "it did not touch him through the rational arguments of a cleric. If God appeared at the end, it was the sudden secret appearance of a thief... without reason, an act of grace."

Rochester is thus the earliest of Graham Greene's black sheep heroes, far more powerfully drawn than the protagonists of the novels Greene was writing at this time ("The Man Within," "Rumour at Nightfall," "The Name of Action"). Facets of Rochester's character will reappear in the dangerous Pinky in "Brighton Rock," the whisky priest, the remorseful husband in "The Heart of the Matter," the God-thwarted amorist in "The End of the Affair." At Rochester's funeral the chaplain preached an unusual sermon: "He seemed to affect something singular and paradoxical in his impieties, as well as in his writings, above the reach and thought of other men... Nay, so confirmed was he in sin, that he oftentimes almost died a martyr for it."

"Lord Rochester's Monkey," with a bibliography containing no item more recent than 1931, is going to catch hell from some scholars. Greene gracefully acknowledges Pinto's work ("I have no wish to rewrite my biography at Professor Pinto's expense") and sideswipes David M. Vieth's 1968 "The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester" (Yale University Press): "As Mr. Vieth admits the attribution to a great many poems depends on subjective judgment, and out ears often differ... Rochester's poems from his death on became more indecent with every year, and I have the impression that Mr. Vieth is inclined to prefer the hotter versions." But 40 years' work on the dating and ascription of Rochester's writings (by Pinto, John Harold Wilson, James Thorpe, Frank H. Ellis, Vieth and others) has left Greene in a number of unprotected positions.

Four out of five verse citations on a single page, during a discussion of Rochester's marriage, are now pretty reliably believed not to be Rochester's. Misdating a letter blunts its fine edge of sarcasm: when Rochester wrote, "My passion for living is so increased that I omit no care of myself... The King, who knows me to be a very ill-natured man, will not think it an easy matter for me to die, now I live chiefly out of spite," it now appears he was not referring to the false report of his death in 1678 but to the King's premature appointment, three years earlier, of Rochester's successor to the lifetime post of the Ranger of Woodstock Park. When Rochester wonders at the enmity of the Duchess of Portsmouth, Greene remarks, "He had forgotten 'Portsmouth's Mirror'" -a poem containing allusions to events after his death.

These lapses disfigure the book but cannot wreck it. Greene's intuition of character yields insights that academic caution might prohibit. He is at his keenest in a chapter on Elizabeth Barry, the London actress who bore Rochester a daughter remembered in his will. Her fellow players despaired of her; she had "not a musical ear" and could not master the declamatory tragedy-queen style. Undertaking her training on a bet, Rochester "caused her to enter into the meaning of every sentiment... and adapt her whole behavior to the situations of the characters." (Professor Pinto loses his head and tells us "we can see here the beginnings of a new art of the theatre that was to culminate in the naturalistic drama of Ibsen, Shaw and Chekov.")

Mrs. Barry became one of the great actresses of her time, unequalled in the art of exciting pity, Colley Cibber said. And notorious offstage, Greene adds, for her combination of immorality and coldness. Thirty-four undated letters to "slattern Betty Barry" exist in print, though not in manuscript. Greene shifts these into a pattern of his own, speculating that she inspired the famous lyric "An age in her embraces past/ Would seem a winter's day"- with its piercing observation that while pleasure may be mistaken for true love, "pain can ne'er deceive." It is a convincing feat of historical imagination. Greene's claim for his Rochester is justified: "So complex a character can be 'dramatized' (in James's sense) in more ways than one. The longer I worked on his life the more living he became to me."